


Working Imperfectly

by fourdaysofrain



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, High School, Hurt/Comfort, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, op is a spanish major and has been waiting for a chance to flex about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:41:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22768705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourdaysofrain/pseuds/fourdaysofrain
Summary: Tick, tick, tick, tick.Peter doesn’t know how it started.Tock, tock, tock, tock.He’s been staring at his ceiling for hours.Tick, tick, tick, tick.He doesn’t even want to look at the clock, knowing he’d hate what he saw.Tock, tock, tock, tock.---Peter struggles with his workload.
Relationships: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 24
Kudos: 121
Collections: Irondad and Spiderson Valentine's Day Fic Exchange 2020





	Working Imperfectly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ephemeralstark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ephemeralstark/gifts).



> This is a (late) Valentine's Day gift exchange fic for the lovely Ellie! I hope you like it, pal! Sorry it's coming a few days late! <3 <3

_Tick, tick, tick, tick._

Peter doesn’t know how it started. 

_Tock, tock, tock, tock._

He’s been staring at his ceiling for hours. 

_Tick, tick, tick, tick._

He doesn’t even want to look at the clock, knowing he’d hate what he saw. 

_Tock, tock, tock, tock._

* * *

Peter’s eyes burned as soon as he opened them to see the sunlight cutting in through his window. He groaned as he flung a hand to his nightstand to turn off his phone alarm. The silence that followed was music to his ears. He closed his eyes again and breathed in deeply, savoring the warmness of his bed. 

“You’re going to be late!” May’s voice cut through the final strings of sleep tying him to his bed. 

He groaned out a response and threw himself out of bed. Everything was sore. He was sore in places he didn’t even know he could feel. He had been up late fighting some… electric guy. He hadn’t stopped to get his name, but he still felt like lightning was zapping between his toes. 

Thankfully he still had some fresh laundry. He threw on some clean clothes and went to the kitchen to eat something before he left for school. May watched him from over her phone as he came in.

“How’d you sleep?” she asked. 

Peter rubbed a hand on the back of his head. “Fine! You know, I slept great.”

“Really?” She turned her phone around so he could see the screen.

Peter took her phone and read through the short article. It was a quick description of the fight from last night. Okay, so the guy’s name was Electro. That’s good to know. 

“That was from the weekend,” he stammered, handing the phone back to May and turning around to shove some bread in the toaster. “They must have been waiting to publish it on a school day.”

“Peter,” she said slowly, standing up and turning him around so she could put her hands on his shoulders. “You can’t do this to yourself. I worry about you.”

Peter shrugged her hands off and turned back to the toaster. “I’m fine, you don’t need to worry about me.”

“And would you say that if you weren’t?” May sighed at his silence. “I love you so much, babes. It’s my job to worry about you.”

“May, I promise.” He took his phone out of his pocket and started to send a text to Ned. “I’ve got it. Spider-Man’s got it. We all got it.”

May sat back down at the table and hummed as she picked up her coffee mug. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” he said. 

May turned off her phone and put it back in her pocket. She cleared her throat. “Tony’s coming over for dinner tonight, by the way.”

Peter looked up from his phone cautiously. “What happened to hating him?”

“Well, it’s funny. He has a way of winning people over.” She paused to look at Peter’s raised eyebrows and smirked. “But Pepper’s who finally turned me around.”

Peter laughed and looked back at his phone. Ned finally replied. 

_I’m here lol,_ the text said. _did u do the study guide for warren?_

He was going to do that last night, but then Electro showed up. _Shit._

He flinched right before the toast popped out of the toaster.

* * *

Peter went through school mechanically. Sit next to Ned in classes, ignore Flash’s quips, zone out while looking at MJ, the usual. He even had time for Ned to info-dump to him about what was on the study guide before he went into Mrs. Warren’s class. 

“And then you have to remember to change the variables, but you already know that,” Ned finished just as they walked through the classroom door. 

Peter sighed as he threw his backpack by a stool. “Thank you so much, man. I owe you one.”

“That’s okay,” Ned said as he claimed the stool across from him. “You probably owe me like, five hundred by now. I’ve learned to not keep track.”

Peter groaned and ran a hand through his hair. It was getting a little long. “I’ll get you one of Mr. Stark’s ashtrays next time I visit. You can sell it on E-bay or something.”

“That’s good, ‘cause I’m totally in it for the money.”

Peter and Ned shared a quick, small laugh as the bell rang and Mrs. Warren started to hand out the tests. 

Peter tried to ignore the clock as he finished his test. Each time the second hand moved sounded like a gong. 

* * *

“It’s not my blood, don’t worry!” Peter called through the apartment as he climbed through the living room window. His bedroom window was blocked by a few tough-looking birds and he didn’t want to disrupt their meeting. 

He was stopping a mugger on the way back from Decathalon, but the mugger somehow ended up swiping the knife across his stomach while trying to do some knife trick to intimidate him. The person he was mugging ran away, and Peter ended up having to call an ambulance and apply pressure to the wound for a while. What a weird day. He ended up with a few small bloodstains, but thankfully everyone would be okay, mugger included. 

He slowly lowered himself from the ceiling and cringed at the faint bloody handprint that stained the white paint. He’d be hearing about that later, surely. He tugged his mask off and turned around to walk to his bedroom before freezing suddenly. 

“Hey, kid,” Tony greeted nonchalantly from the couch. 

Tony and Pepper were sitting on their couch. Right, May had said they were coming over for dinner. Tony’s eyes were crinkled with mirth behind his tinted glasses. Thankfully Pepper remained cordial. 

“Nice to finally meet you, Peter. Tony’s told me a lot about you,” she said, standing up and offering her hand. 

Peter vigorously wiped his hand on his thigh to get the blood off of it before shaking her hand. He didn’t feel too much stickiness when they separated, which was a good sign. He tried to give her a smile that didn’t look deranged. 

“Nice to meet you too, Ms. Potts.” He leaned around Pepper to look at Tony, who was still sitting on the couch. “You talk about me?”

Tony shrugged and removed his tinted glasses. “When you’re not covered in blood.”

“When am I covered in blood?” Peter looked down at his suit and then at the professional chic outfits Tony and Pepper were wearing. “I’m just going to go change real quick.”

He got a few feet past the couch before almost running into May, who was bringing Pepper and Tony snacks from the kitchen. She jumped, almost spilling the crackers. 

“Peter,” she sighed, “I love you so, so much, but you’re all over the place today. I set out some nice clothes on your bed, go get changed.”

Peter nodded and left to change out of his suit, but not before grabbing a few crackers and cheese slices from May’s plate. 

* * *

The clinking of silverware seemed to fill the room. Tony and Pepper were perfectly polite, the food was great, but it was weird to mix his Spider-Man life with his personal life. It would be like if that weird lizard dude from last month started teaching his science class. 

“May, the chicken carbonara is lovely,” Pepper said, breaking the silence. 

May smiled at the compliment. “Thanks, it’s one of the few things I can make. It’s my mom’s recipe.”

Pepper and May’s chatting slowly faded into the background of Peter’s mind. He focused on the pasta he was twirling on his fork. 

His mind went to school. He had a project for Spanish due on Friday, some math homework slowly piling up in his notebook, and a history assignment he had to get done. He knew that by the time he finished everything, he’d have a whole new set of homework assignments to stress out about. 

He hoped everyone in Queens could just take it easy on the crime for the next few days so he could get caught up on everything. 

May nudged his ankle with her foot from under the table and he looked up from his plate to see Tony and Pepper looking at him. 

“Uh… what?” 

Tony chuckled and asked, probably for the second time, “How’s the suit holding up? Dubious blood stains aside.”

“Oh, it’s great, Mr. Stark. Really nice. It stretches in the right places and… everything.” He shoved some pasta in his mouth so he didn’t keep rambling. 

“Good to hear,” Tony said with a laugh at the edge of his voice. He makes eye contact with Pepper before looking back at Peter. “Pep and I wanted to invite you to come to the lab upstate and work on a new suit. It’d be good for you to get some input on the new design.”

Peter stopped chewing and looked at May incredulously. 

She smiled and said, “It’s fine with me.”

He swallowed his half-chewed pasta. “Yeah, that’d be-- that’d be really cool, Mr. Stark. That’d be great.”

“Great,” Tony said with a smile. “Happy can pick you up after school on Friday.”

“Wow, thank you, Mr. Stark,” he said, trying to ignore his ever-growing to-do list that had to be done by then. “That’d be awesome.”

May nudged his shoulder with hers. “As long as you get all your homework done. Spider-Man can’t be failing any classes.”

“Easy-peasy,” he said, squinting at her. “Piece of cake. Homework’s easy.”

He joined in with the slow wave of laughter that spread across the table. 

* * *

Before he knew it, it was already Thursday night. He was sitting at his desk, staring down his Spanish project as his clock kept moving forward and forward. 

_Cuando tenía ocho años, me gustaba ver las películas_ Star Wars _con mi tío. Íbamos al cine juntos._

The imperfect tense would never make sense to him. Neither would the formulas he was learning in calculus. Or the war he was learning about in history. He sighed and put his head in his hands. 

If he turned his head just right, he could see the corner of his Spider-Man suit peeking out of his backpack. He started to smile and shut his laptop.

* * *

_This_ is what made it all worth it. Swinging through the fresh night air and feeling his gut lurch with adrenaline at every downswing. He felt like nothing could touch him when he was like this.

A tone rang in his ears and he looked to the corner of his UI where Tony’s face was currently flashing as he ran along a rooftop. 

_Almost_ nothing could touch him while he was like this. 

“Can you accept the call, Karen?” he asked, flipping backward over the edge of the building and falling into a swing. 

He only had a moment of the wind rushing past him before Tony started talking. “Got a sec, Pete?”

“Yeah, I’ve got plenty of secs.” He screwed up his face as he swung up and planted himself on a rooftop. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

He heard a small sigh over the line. “I’m going to do us both a favor and ignore that. What’re you doing up so late?”

“Oh, you know,” he said, swinging his feet off the side of the building. “Just swinging around. Stopping crime. All that stuff.”

“I seem to remember May giving you a curfew of 11pm, is that still in place?”

Peter checked the time at the side of his UI. It was past midnight. “Uh, no. She decided to take a more… flexible stance on that.”

“Let’s pretend you told the truth just then. Why are you out past curfew?”

“Who says I’m out past curfew?” He stood up and started pacing. “Why are you up so late, anyway?”

Peter blinked when Tony suddenly hung up the call. He only had a moment to react before he heard the Iron Man suit land on the other side of the rooftop. The suit parted to let Tony step out, dressed in a faded band shirt and oil-stained jeans. 

“I was field-testing some ideas for tomorrow when I got a little blip saying you were still out,” he said, clapping his hands together. “So what’s the deal, kid? Are you nervous to check out my lab? Totally understandable, but you shouldn’t worry too much. I let DUM-E roll around, and he’s more of a mess than you.”

“It’s not that at all, it’s just--” Peter tugged his mask off, feeling strands of hair fall at the base of his neck. He rubbed them between his fingers. “Do you think I need a haircut? I feel like my hair’s been getting really long and I _know_ I need to get one, but it’s just that there’s a million different places to do it and I don’t even--”

Tony walked towards him with his hands up, as if approaching a wild animal. “Hey, woah, kid. Your hair’s fine. I’ve got a barber I can send to your apartment if you need.”

“It’s not even that. It’s--” Peter ran a hand through his hair. “It’s just stupid, is what it is. I’m Spider-Man, right? I should be able to handle this--” He slumped against the concrete barrier around the edge of the roof and cradled his head. “This! High school, classes, friends, all of it. It’s not hard! I can just-- can _see_ everyone else doing it. Betty does everything I do _and_ she does the announcements _and_ has a job to save up for college.”

“Betty isn’t also moonlighting as Spider-Man.”

Peter made a noise that sounded almost like a growl. “That’s not the-- She could! If she was Spider-Man, she would be able to, is the thing! I just don’t know what everyone else has that I don’t! That’s it!”

He heaved out a sigh. When he spoke again, it was much softer. 

“I just feel like I’m drowning.” He looks up to Tony from where he’s sitting. His eyes are glazed with a thin veil of tears. ”And every time I get close to breaking the surface and getting a chance to breathe, the water level just rises again. I never get a chance to stop moving.”

Tony carefully sits next to him. After a second, he places a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “We can work with this. You’re feeling overwhelmed. That’s… That’s a normal teen thing.”

Peter choked out a laugh and rubbed his eyes. “I guess. It sucks.”

“Yeah, I remember it _sucking_ quite a bit,” Tony said. He motioned between the two of them. “But this is good. Communication. Asking for help. That’s good. That’s all you.”

Peter shrugged and hummed in response. 

“You know what’s not good, though?” Peter looked up at Tony. “Using your suit as a way to escape your issues.”

“Sorry,” Peter mumbled, looking down at his lap. 

Tony sucked air through his teeth sharply. “No, you-- You don’t have to apologize, kid. This is normal, what you’re doing. I’m warning you about the suits as a preventative measure.” He looked up at the stars and exhaled softly. “It can be hard to have such an easy escape route. Who needs to worry about the lowly issues of the people when you can just fly away from it all, right?”

Peter joined Tony in watching the stars. Even though the smog of the city covered a lot of their view, they could still see the lights twinkling in the distance. 

“But you’re too young to worry about all that yet,” Tony said, giving Peter’s one last squeeze before removing his hand. “So hit me, stripling. What’s got you down?”

“Um… homework?” he offered after a moment.

Tony scratched his jawline. “Let’s narrow it down a bit, eh? Anything due tomorrow?”

“Well,” Peter sighed, “I’m supposed to write a paragraph in the imperfect tense for Spanish, but I never know when to use it, even though Mr. DiPaolo has explained it a million times.”

“Okay.” Tony paused. ”Well, that’s doable.” He stood up and walked over to his suit. “Italian’s got a similar quirk to the past tense. I might not be as good as your teacher at explaining, but I know the ropes. Sit tight.”

“Wait, what?” Peter pushed himself up and followed Tony. “Are you teaching me Spanish?”

Tony detached the helmet from the suit and moved to stand in the center of the roof. “Got nothing better to do at midnight on a Thursday. As long as you promise to keep this to yourself. Your aunt is a force to be reckoned with.” He paused to think. “On second thought, you can tell her how good of a mentor I was by teaching you Spanish, just leave off the fact that it happened past curfew.” 

Tony placed the helmet down on the surface of the roof and minutely adjusted the angle it was facing. After a moment, he stood up and moved in front of it, wiping his hands on his jeans. 

“Sit,” Tony said, pointing at the ground a few feet from his helmet. 

Peter sat. “Mr. Stark, you don’t have to do this. I can look up a Quizlet or something.”

Tony waved him off. “Nonsense, kid. You’ll be back home and practically fluent in less than an hour. You can even hitch a ride back on the suit if you promise not to use your taser webs.” He checked his watch and frowned. “Not that this is going to be a _thing_ between us. This is a one-time offer. Don’t form a habit of staying up this late.”

“Yeah, of course. Of course.” Peter scooted himself closer and looked up at Tony. “This is so cool,” he said, almost to himself.

“Don’t let it get to your head,” Tony said with a ghost of a smirk. He clapped his hands at the helmet. “Hit it, FRI!”

A holographic screen coming from the helmet flicked on to the side of Tony. He used his finger to write _el imperfecto_ on one side and _el pretérito_ on the other. 

Peter still had a lot of homework to do. He knew he would still have trouble managing his life with Spider-Man. But sitting on the top of a building past midnight, being taught how to use the Spanish past tense by Iron Man, he realized he would always have people to help him if he needed it.

**Author's Note:**

> okay this is relatively low stakes compared to a lot of fics but i love my boy and can’t be too mean to him   
> also finally using my spanish degree for something good!


End file.
